The Doctor then goes on, in brief but cheerful journalizing upon sundry select dinners that had been given at the Duke of Portland’s and at Mr. Crewe’s, for meetings with Lord Macartney, Mr. Canning, Mr. and Mrs. Windham, Miss Hayman, Mr. Frankland, &c. &c., and then thus gaily concludes his letter:
“My cough is better; and so am I; and, as Horace Walpole used to say, ‘I am now at my best—for I shall never be better!’ I work at my astronomy, polish, make notes, &c., and often see Herschel, with whom I dearly love to conjure—as Daddy Crisp called all commerce upon the sciences. I review an article now and then for Griffith; I have had a most comic letter from dear Twi.;[58] I have gotten twenty-nine subscribers for Haydn; and to-morrow I shall have the musical graduates to dine with me.—And now I must run and dress.
“So here’s my history;—and so good night, and God bless you and your Alexanders, the Great and the Little.”
Three days afterwards he writes:
“A Burney party dined with me yesterday; and we were as merry, and laughed as bonnily as the Burneys always do when they get together, and open their hearts, and tell old stories, and have no fear of being quizzed by interlopers.”
About this period, Dr. Burney had become extremely earnest that the recluse of West Hamble should no longer wholly abandon her pen. He had acquiesced in her declining a project which would have occupied, at least involved it, in politics; for politics, save as affecting passing events, he held, abstractedly, to be out of the province of women. To any decided bent he would, nevertheless, have given way; but his own native inclination led him to wish that morals and manners, as swaying society, not as organizing difficulties of state, should employ their faculties: and one of his most constant desires was to see the writings of this recluse engaged by her imagination and her reflections. In relinquishing, therefore, the more ambitious enterprise of Mrs. Crewe, he urged the production of a pastoral tragedy, of which his daughter had shown him the manuscript before her marriage; and which he now pressed her to bring forth with a vivacity that would surely have charmed her into compliance; but that a secret solicitude, a trembling anticipation of anguish had seized so severely upon her earliest and tenderest affections, as wholly to nullify all literary operations.
And, even yet, with what pain does she approach—perforce!—the afflicting subject of the most heart-rending calamity that could then befal Dr. Burney—yet which, even while thus vividly the gayest scenes of his latter years were passing, and thus benignly for the gratification of the Camilla-cottage Hermits, were recording, was almost hourly, though obscurely, impending over his peace!
